General User Management

Creating a new User

1. Go to "Users" tab on the main menu
2. Click on the "Add a new user" link in the sidebar.
(If you do not see this link you do not dispose of the necessary permissions.)

3. The "Add User" page will appear. Here you can fill out the users email, first and second names, password and other user specific information.
4. Choose the User Profile of the new user. The membership of these groups determine which information the user can see, modify or administer. Find additional information about the roles in section 'Permissions and Access Rights'.

Please note that a user needs to be at least a member of one of the following groups: "Employees", "Customers" or "Freelancer".
Membership for these groups should be mutual exclusive, otherwise system will behave inconsistently when determining page content.

Managing Employee Information

Managing the Users Contact Information

Contact information allow to specify a large number of address related information about a user.

Setting the Users Portrait Picture

Users portrait are used typically in the intranets of distributed organizations to present employees to the staff of other offices. Knowing about employees of other offices allows for easier communication and improves the coherence in a distributed organization.

Managing User related Documents

A ]po[ File Storage Portlet is meant to store CVs, contracts and other user specific information.

Managing Skills

Freelance skills are list of "Skill Type" - "Qualification" pairs that describe the skills of a freelancer. The sample below shows some typical skill types for Translation Freelancers, however this Portlet is configurable and can be adjusted to other skill types, e.g. IT Skills.

Source Language

Target Language

Sworn Language

TM Tools

LOC Tools

Operating System

Subjects

Skill

Claim

en

High

ca_ES

fr

Skill

Claim

es_ES

High

Skill

Claim

fr

Skill

Claim

Trados 3.x

Medium

Skill

Claim

Skill

Claim

Skill

Claim

Eco

High

Set Order First Name / Last Name

By default all users are shown as FIRST LAST. If you wish a different order please get in touch with your System Administrator and ask him to change parameter NameOrder accordingly.

Delete a user

Users can be "deleted" by changing their status in the Administration portlet of their user account (http://[YOUR_SERVER]/intranet/users/view?user_id=[USER_ID]):
As a matter of fact a user is not entirely removed from the system but rather "de-activated". For compliance reason, the system needs to be capable of providing information about users activities and relationships to other objects such as projects and companies after leaving the organization.

In some cases you might want to remove a user entirely from the system. In this case please use the "Nuke" feature you'll find in ADMIN->DELETE DEMO DATA. Nuking might require additional steps to be executed on a database level and should be performed by System Administrators only.

Re-activate a deleted user

Use ]po[ Full-Text search and find user based on name or email address. Please note that you would need to check "Include deleted".
Open user account and change status in ADMIN portlet (see above).

Depending on the ]po[ version you are using you might need to to assign a new password to the re-activated user.

CSV Bulk Update Users

User data can exported, edited in a third party application such as MS EXCEL and re-imported again.
This feature is available from V4.x on and located at: http://[YOUR_SERVER]/intranet/users/upload-users

As of February 2013 we support updating "Hourly Costs" only. It has been developed in the first place to support bulk updates of User Attribute "Hourly Cost" for "Skill Profiles".
Users connected with those Skill Profile will be automatically updated if desired.

The feature requires a "Dynamic Field" for object type "Person" named "skill_role_id", stored in table "im_employees".

Please create the widget accordingly. In earlier versions of ]po[ Skill Profiles had been defined as a category. Later versions use a "Skill Profile User" account.

Feature will be be further extended to support bulk-updates of all Standard and Dynamic User Attributes. For additional information please see our roadmap or get in touch with us.

In a first step please upload the CSV file containing user data.
Your file needs to contain at least one of following attributes that are used to determine the user record in ]po[:

]po[ User Id

email

First Names and last Name

As a rule, these fields will never be updated.

You also need to indicate the format of numeric values your CSV file contains (Decimal Separator - comma vs. decimal point).
In case your configuration maps Skill Profiles to users, you can use Advanced Settings in order to aumotically update the Hourly Costs of all users related to a Skill Profile to be changed during the import.

In a second step you would need to map all fields found in the CSV file with the database fields.
Simply choose one element each for Import File and User Attribute and relate by using "Assign".

Once all mappings have been entered, you can submit the form.

In a first step the tool performs a test import. If the system is unable to find a user record for a CSV record, the import breaks.
In this case you have two options:

Remove the record from the import file and restart from the beginning

Create a user record in ]po[ and refresh the page that shows the error

In another validation the importing tools validates the data types of the values provided. If data types do not coincide, the import will also be denied.

To ensure a correct import, all update attempts are performed "All or Nothing". In other words: Nothing will be imported until the file has been adjusted and errors that occurred during the import attempts have been addressed by either adding or changing ]po[ master data or the import file itself.

Please note: To update the users vacation data a more advanced feature is available. Find additional information in the Absence Tutorial

Relate Users to other Objects

Adding a User to a Project

Project roles define access permissions to project on a case-by-case base. Project roles are particularly useful for "Freelancers" and "Clients" with normally very restricted access to the system.

Project Roles can be extended and customized for a specific company. However, a number of predefined project roles exist:

Administrator:
The administrator of a project can assign new users to the project and change its main characteristics. Also, the enjoys full read and write access to all associated components such as discussion forums and filestorage.

Member:
A member has access to all information of a business object but is not allowed to administer the object.

Adding a User to an Office

In order to assign a user to an office, please go http://[YOUR_SERVER]/intranet/offices , choose an office and assign members.

If a user is assigned to at least one office, a portlet on the users main page is shown:
http://[YOUR_SERVER]/intranet/users/view?user_id=[USER_ID]

Role Based Access Control

The management of permissions and access rights is the most complicated element of ]project-open[ because it really is a management of trust relationships. There is a dilemma between:

Access: Users should have access to all information and documents necessary to do their job.

Restriction: Users should not have access to more information then necessary to do their job.

To solve this dilemma ]project-open[ introduces three types of access permissions:

"User Profiles" which correspond to department membership in a company

"Project Roles" which correspond to the function of the user in a specific project and

"User Hierarchy" which corresponds to the hierarchy in the company.

Each of these concepts are explained below.

User Profiles

User profiles correspond to department membership in the company or business partners respectively.

Senior Management: The management of the company with access to all corporate information

Project Managers: Employees with special skills to manage projects

Employees: Each Employee needs to be at least a member of this group

Finance: Employees with access to financial documents and other financial information

Freelancers: External users who can take part in specific projects. Freelancers have basically no access rights outside the specific projects they take part of.

Clients: External users with permissions similar to Freelancers.

Please note that the membership in groups Employees, Freelancers and Clients is mutually exclusive. Although the system allows this configuration option, it might not lead to a desired behavior in some areas of ]po[.

Skill Profiles

A different type of profile is the so called "Skill profile". For each skill profile / skill set in the organization a virtual user record is created. These "Skill Users" represent skill set and serve for several purposes:

Support of project staffing (show all user having the skills as defined for the project to staff

High level project planning

OpenACS Group Management

Add group

To add a group please go to http://[YOUR_SERVER]/intranet/admin/profiles/ and choose "Add a new profile".
Please choose a Profile name and create a group. As a next step you need to set VIEW, READ, WRITE and ADMIN permissions related to the already existing groups in the system. This needs to be done on page: http://[YOUR_SERVER]/intranet/admin/user_matrix/
Please note that missing permission settings will will lead to incomplete data shown to users that are members of the newly created profile.